


what we talk about (when we talk about love)

by pentaghastly



Category: iZombie (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, F/M, Liv just thinks he's a great big dork with a very nice accent, Ravi thinks Liv is the prettiest thing that he's ever seen, ravioli ravioli please become canon-oli, that coffee shop AU that no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 18:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12305562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly
Summary: He leaves with his name and phone number scribbled onto a napkin -Ravi- and Liv knows she probably won’t (can’t) call it but it’s definitely more than nothing.More than nothing, but she has to pretend like it’s less.(alternatively titled,So there was this one time that Olivia Moore got scratched at a boat party anddied, and, let’s be honest, it’s a shitty start to her story but there’s really no other way that it could ever begin.)





	what we talk about (when we talk about love)

So there was this one time that Olivia Moore got scratched at a boat party and _died_ , and, let’s be honest, it’s a shitty start to her story but there’s really no other way that it could ever begin.

It continues a little like this:

She can’t go back to the hospital, and there’s a job opening in the morgue but even that sounds like something she can’t stomach. Liv knows she needs to get brains from somewhere, but there’s something about being dead and working around dead people that just seems a bit _wrong_ , a little bit too twisted. Instead she does the next best thing a person can do when their life has gone to shit: she gets a job at an all-night coffee shop where no one pays the bags under her eyes half a mind.

Mostly because they’re all too drunk or high or cranked out on caffeine to notice, but that suits her just as well.

There’s a guy who delivers brains and he doesn’t tell her where they come from and Liv doesn’t ask - she doesn’t want to know - and when she makes a triple-shot salted caramel macchiato with no whip, extra syrup, the annoyance she feels at the fact that a drink like that even exists almost makes her feel human again. 

And she knows it’s not the life she was ever supposed to have (and she knows it’s hardly a life at all), but it’s got to be better than nothing.

.

“This,” the man says, placing his cup on the counter far harder than the situation calls for, “is the single most exceptional coffee I’ve ever had. Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got a gift?”

He’s the only customer in the shop, but that’s not a rare occurrence. Their average number of clientele at any given time is between one and five, and being that it’s a Tuesday the numbers tend to shift towards the lower end. This one - she knows this one, with his beard and his accent and his smiles that are _far_ too bright for two in the morning. Liv always feels like asking him if he wandered in there by accident, but apparently that isn’t the case.

He’s nice, and it’s throwing her off. Most of her customers don’t say anything to her besides their order, throwing their money on the counter and walking away. The level of attention that he’s paying her is something different, and she doesn’t know how to feel about it.

(The brain she’s eaten today is telling her he’s an _asshole_ , but he’s also a customer so she chooses to ignore it.)

“It’s just coffee,” she says, because she doesn’t really know how else to respond, “and I didn’t even brew it myself, so the only thing I’ve got a gift for is pouring things into cups.”

“A very underrated talent.” He’s leaning forward on the counter, and leaning forward means he’s not leaving, and leaning forward means Liv is taking a step back. “Have you ever tried a cup yourself? Don’t take this the wrong way, but it looks like you need it. The goth thing works for you, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s not actually all makeup.” 

He says the words with humor but also with sweetness and he doesn’t stop talking and there’s this moment, just for a second, where he reminds her of Major - there’s a softness in his eyes that she’s not really seen in anyone else before, but even Major didn’t exude sunshine in the way that this guy does. It’s both bizarre and captivating; she sort of wants to drown in it. “I don’t drink coffee,” Liv says, and she means ‘ _I don’t drink coffee anymore_ ’, but that’s a whole other conversation.

“Not even if a handsome, charming British man is offering to buy you one?” and she thinks _oh, so that’s what this is_.

“Does the handsome British man offering to buy me a coffee realize,” she replies, and her tone is the same but this time she’s actually smiling, a small lift at the corners that she’d still deny even if her not-life depended on it, “that, being a loyal employee of a cafe, I get all my coffee for free?”

It’s not a yes, but it’s not a no either. It’s a _something_ , and Liv’s a zombie who has no time for dating and human relationships but maybe she’s a little bit human, too - or maybe she just wants to feel like it again, and there’s something about being hit on in a coffee shop that’s the most terribly human thing in the world. Maybe it doesn’t matter at all, because he’s smiling at her like she’s the most incredible thing in the world and he says, “You think I’m _handsome_ ,” like a twelve year old with a crush.

He leaves with his name and phone number scribbled onto a napkin - _Ravi_ \- and Liv knows she probably won’t (can’t) call it but it’s definitely more than nothing.

.

More than nothing, but she has to pretend like it’s less.

Zombies don’t date humans. That’s why she ended it with Major, why she screened all his calls, why she ignored Peyton and her mother’s disapproving glares - because zombies don’t date humans, and the only thing Liv Moore knows about herself anymore is that she is most definitely a zombie.

He’ll thank her later, she thinks, or he would if he ever knew the truth. In the end, she knows he’s going to thank her.

.

“You never called me.” 

Ravi actually sounds hurt, but Liv tries not to put too much stock into that. Instead she chalks it up to the fragile male ego - but then the brain that she’d been on when he’d given her his number was a woman who’d suffered a devastating break up right before she died, so really it may just be that her feelings towards the male population weren’t exactly flattering at the time.

Not that it really matters anyways, because he’s right. She hadn’t called him, and she couldn’t blame that part on the brain. Rather she blamed it on the _brains_ , plural, and the fact that zombieism and human relationships didn’t go hand in hand.

Breaking up with Major. Cutting off her family. Moving out from her place with Peyton. At this point she’s more than learned her lesson.

“I don’t have a phone,” Liv says, and it’s a horrible lie but it’s the sort that she needs to tell. She already likes Ravi, liking someone at all is more than she can afford right now. Her emotional dance card is all filled up with humans - the last thing she needs is to add another one to the roster.

But Ravi doesn’t even look offended, just a little bit amused and a little bit fond, and it’s a terrifying sight to see. “That’s an almost insultingly terrible excuse,” he tells her, clearly all too happy to call her right out, “particularly when we both know the truth. You’re not a very good liar, Olivia.” Her breath catches in her throat, because it’s impossible but he _knows_ \- Liv doesn’t know how, but he must, and before she can leap on the defensive he’s cutting her off. “You’re scared you’re going to spend more than five minutes with me and fall right in love.”

_Oh._

So, okay, scratch that - Ravi definitely doesn’t know, but then he’s not entirely wrong either, and Liv isn’t sure which of the two options - him knowing she’s a zombie, or her actually _liking_ him - is less terrifying. 

Whether or not that matters Liv isn’t actually sure, but then she’s not really sure of anything lately. All she knows is that Ravi’s leaning over the counter smiling at her with that smile - that stupid fucking smile of his that she’s sure isn’t Liv-specific but makes her feel like it’s meant for her anyways - and she sighs.

“My shift’s almost over,” she says, not feeling half as reluctant as she sounds. “Do you want to have a drink with me?”

.

Liv doesn’t really get drunk anymore, but it’s not for lack of trying. Ravi, on the other hand, can apparently open his jaw like a snake to take back more shots than she’s ever seen anyone not-dead manage to do, and it’d be terrifying if it wasn’t so strangely...attractive.

He’s definitely drunk. She’s just hazy, like her head is lighter than the rest of her body and the world is only just a little bit sideways, but she’s still seeing things clear enough. Like she can still see the way his eyes stay glued to hers when she talks about the sort of things that matter instead of wandering down towards her legs, or her chest, or even her lips - he’s definitely drunk, but he’s _listening_ , and he’s listening like he really cares.

Or she can see the way he blushes, despite all his bravado, when her knee brushes against his underneath their table. Liv misses lots of things about being human, but right now she doesn’t miss blushing because she knows that she would be every time he looks at her, and she knows Ravi’s the sort who’d tease her for it mercilessly.

They talk about lots of things - _big_ things. Not zombie-big, but they talk about Major and it’s shockingly not awkward, and she talks to him about his work and his dreams of the CDC and spilling their souls actually feels shockingly...okay. Natural. Like they’d already done it a thousand times before.

“I can’t believe you almost took the job in the morgue,” he says, repeating the shock he’s already expressed a dozen times, but Liv isn’t annoyed by his repetition because she really can’t believe it either. “I would have been your boss. We would have been dead body buddies. Now the only dead body buddy I have is _Carl_ , and honestly Liv, for the first time in my life I actually envy the dead people who come in. At least they don’t have to listen to him talk about his favourite episodes of My Little Pony and how I’m _definitely_ a Twilight Sparkle twenty-four seven.”

Maybe, she thinks, she should have taken the job. Maybe it would have been easier to know where the brains she was eating were coming from instead of having to rely on someone else to bring them to her. Maybe it would have been nice, spending all that time with Ravi, but then she supposes that she found her way to him anyways.

Interesting, that.

“You’d get sick of working with me too,” she tells him, and it feels like the truth. “Believe me, I’m best in small portions.” 

“Impossible. I could drink a bloody case of you, Olivia Moore.” He’s looking at her like she’s completely lost her mind, and maybe she has, because one minute she’s on her barstool and the next she’s halfway off it, kissing him like she’s wanted to since the first time he walked into her shop with his stupid pick-up lines and his infuriating smile.

It’s only when he moans into her mouth and pulls her closer that she knows she has to back away, because she still doesn’t know how zombieism is transferred and she’d feel pretty terrible if sweet, beautiful, living Ravi turned into a member of the living dead all because she wasn’t able to control her libido. So she says, “Can we take this slow?” and he nods, pressing his forehead against hers, and she doesn’t have to open her eyes to know that he’s got that smile plastered on his face again.

And, she thinks, maybe it is a bit Liv-specific after all.

.

It goes a bit like this:

She wakes up in her own bed the next morning without a hangover and completely lacking a headache, but she wakes with a hunger that acts as more than enough motivation to drag her out of bed. The brain in her fridge right now, the last one she had delivered, is a good one - a nice, stable, twenty-one year old engineering student without any major trauma that Liv had to worry about dealing with, and it sounds like exactly what she needed.

So she whips up a couple scrambled eggs and garnishes them with chives and dead girl and a mountain of hot sauce, and it’s only when she hears someone clearing their throat in the entrance to her kitchen that she realizes she may have forgotten something.

 _Ravi_. Drunk Ravi, who she’d let sleep on her couch because there was no way in hell he was going to get himself home in the state that he was and maybe she hadn’t been ready to say goodbye to him quite yet, maybe she’d discovered the limits of zombie-related alcohol resistance and left him there as a pleasant surprise for morning Liv - just, perhaps, not morning Liv with a piece of brain raised to her lips.

“How long have you been standing there?” she asks, but she knows that he knows she doesn’t need to hear the answer to know what it is.

“I have _so_ many questions,” he says, and this is nothing compared to dying - this is so, _so_ much worse, but Ravi isn’t done yet. “First, why the hot sauce? Is that a zombie thing?” And a million excuses, a million denials, come to the tip of her tongue, but none of them seem to be enough.

So there’s this one time that she found herself having a massive crush on a guy at a coffee shop and he figured out she’s a zombie, and it all feels like the end of the world until she looks at him - actually, properly looks - and realizes that he’s smiling.

( _Definitely_ Liv-specific.)

.

**Author's Note:**

> this is indulgent trash  
> please indulge me more and leave a kudos/review xx


End file.
